Published at 24th of February 2024 10:34 am

Chapter Book 2, Chapter 10

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

The odds of Tanner actually coming through with a shard seemed long to me. If he managed it, then fantastic. I’d give him a few remedial lessons, he’d show me how to bypass the wall, and everyone would be happy. In the meantime, I planned to keep looking into alternate ways to sneak into the center of the city. In the extremely likely event that Tanner failed to get the mana he needed, I couldn’t afford to waste my time sitting around.

There was one thing I wanted to do, something I should have done before I’d ever entered Derro, but which I’d had too many other things occupying my time to work on. I needed a bigger mana crystal. With my core at stage two, I was now producing mana fast enough that my old crystal could be filled in a little over a week by myself. I had plans to steal a lot of mana from the cabal that had taken over my village and I needed a place to put it.

Fortunately for me, I had plenty of raw materials to work with in this ruined stone city. Any number of stone slabs could have served as the basis for creating a new mana crystal, including a few back in the abandoned home I’d commandeered. I was eager to get back to my hideout and start on that project, something I’d already be doing if not for that fortuitous opportunity with the leech stones and the distraction of the two street kids.

Tanner and his friend left, the whole time arguing quietly with each other. Personally, I was more inclined to side with the older boy. Tanner was probably going to get himself hurt or killed going after a shard, but maybe he’d think of something clever and pull it off. Either way, it wasn’t my problem right now.

Once I was alone again, I jumped out through the hole in the wall, drifted down to the ground, and walked back to my hideout. My stomach started rumbling again while I walked, reminding me that I still needed to address the lack of food in my life. I couldn’t rely on mana to keep me going forever, and with a sigh, I changed course to head back to that market square.

All my potential money was waiting for me to have the time and mana to infuse it, and it was inconvenient to carry besides. But I did have a phantom space with some leftover bartering scraps from my time in the wastes, and with any luck, I’d find someone willing to buy them. There was a nice pair of gracefully curving horns I’d cut off a monster I’d run into that excreted drops of flaming oil from its body. The oil had proven too volatile to be contained without special equipment, but the horns weren’t flammable. They’d retained that essence of fire and would make a fine alchemical reagent when ground up.

That meant I probably wouldn’t get close to what they were truly worth, but they did me no good as it stood. Alchemy was, for all intents and purposes, a lost art on this cursed island. Without ambient mana, none of the plants that were commonly used in potions and elixirs could grow. Even if they did, they’d have almost no mana and would be worthless anyway.

After manifesting my satchel as a cover for pulling other things from my phantom space, I approached the market from the south end, ignored the suspicious stares I got from the guard stationed at the entrance, and dove into the crowd. Stalls were set up around the outer edges of the square, often blocking smaller streets that should have fed into the market in the process, and there were three large buildings that had been restored to have solid walls and full roofs that served as anchor points for much of the business.

The entire market was a wall of sound, so much of it that it was almost tangible. Vendors shouted at anybody who walked too close, shoppers chatted with each other or haggled loudly with the vendors, the guards watching the square occasionally yelled at anybody they found suspicious, and the draft animals tied to their owners’ carts occasionally brayed.

There were invocations that could sort that out for me, even ones that would allow me to listen to multiple conversations at once when combined with specific divinations. It was tempting to cast the spells just to save myself the headache, but I resisted the urge. It would be a frivolous waste of mana just for some temporary comfort.

On the other hand, it might help me locate someone who was interested in buying my monster parts. It would certainly be easier than manually checking each stall and possibly drawing the ire of the vendors or guards. My age and size were already working against me, what with a den of child thieves living nearby who probably regularly terrorized both the farmers coming in to sell food and the citizens who showed up to buy it.

But no, that was just a rationalization. My phantom space was still recovering from relocating the leech stones, I needed days’ worth of mana to construct a new mana crystal, and I also needed to consider converting my own mana to money if selling my monster scraps didn’t work out for me.

Six months ago, I wouldn’t even have considered spending my precious mana on something so frivolous. Finishing my mana lattice and upgrading my core to stage two had made me far less thrifty, to the point where I did foolish things like jumping out of second story buildings instead of taking the stairs down just to avoid wriggling through a hole in the wall that would have required no mana to traverse.

Besides, I could tell what vendors would be interested simply by examining the wares they had on display as I passed by. A simple lap around the market was enough for me to pick out three potential buyers, though the first one warned me off with a dark scowl the moment he saw me approaching him. Not wanting any trouble, I mentally shuffled him down to the bottom of my list. If the other two proved to be dead ends, I’d try my luck at that stall again.

Of the remaining two, one was a little old woman with what looked like a permanent stall. She’d ensconced herself in one of the broken-down buildings that was little more than a low wall and an empty archway on the west side of the square. It was full of all sorts of random curiosities, which made me think I might be able to offload a few things there.

The other potential buyer was a man selling what he claimed were various remedies. There was enough mana hidden inside the little palm-sized ceramic pots to make me believe there was something there, though I doubted anything he was selling was worth half what he wanted for it. Still, that was my first real piece of evidence that anyone around here even knew what alchemy was. Despite how sketchy his entire set up looked, that was what made me decide to try his stall first.

“Hey, you buying too?” I asked as I approached.

“Whatever you stole, I don’t want anything to do with it,” the man said.

“I didn’t steal anything. What is it with this city and thinking every kid that walks through is a thief?”

“Because you all are. If you don’t want people thinking you’re a thief, stop dressing like one.”

“Look, I’m not talking to you to be hassled. I’ve got some monster parts which could be useful for alchemy. You want to take a look or not?”

The alchemist sneered down his nose at me and said, “What could you possibly have that I’d be interested in? I’m not sensing a drop of mana in you.”

That was because I was shielding my core and everything else that had any mana in it was hidden away in my phantom space. I made a show of reaching into my satchel and pulled the first horn to my hand, where I withdrew it from a bag that was just slightly too small to hold something that long. “This, for starters,” I said.

Sealing mana in a monster reagent upon its death was a tricky technique, but I’d managed to do it to both horns before the rest of the monster’s mana was released into the air. Powdered, they would make an excellent holding agent for brews that had sensitive temperature requirements, and could act as a catalyst for ingredients that needed a spark of heat to activate. Hopefully, this guy would know that too.

Judging by the gleam in his eye, he knew exactly what I had and what it was good for. I only saw it for a moment before he fixed his expression into a neutral mask and said, “It’s pretty, but the mana’s almost completely drained out of it. I could give you a few specks just ‘cause I like the look of it, but it’s worthless.”

“Your mana sense must be garbage if you believe that,” I said. “Or are you just trying to scam me because you think I don’t know any better?”

“I’m not scamming you, kid. This thing is garbage and I’m only offering to take it off your hands out of pity. Three specks, take it or leave it.”

“Leave it,” I said, putting the horn back into my bag. “The mana’s fine in this thing. I’ll find someone else who’s not interested in ripping people off.”

“Wait, wait. Fine. So it’s got a little mana in it, but how do I know whoever you lifted it off of isn’t going to be tracking me down demanding it back?”

“I guess you’ll just have to take my word that it’s not stolen,” I said. “I want two shards for it.”

“Two shards?” the merchant sputtered. “You’re out of your damn mind! I’ll give you three tenners.”

“That’s a lot more than three specks,” I said. “Maybe I should go take this elsewhere.”

I didn’t really want to. The old lady might buy it, but only because of the way it looked. I wouldn’t get what it was worth from her. The other merchant looked ready to strangle me just for walking near his stall, even if he did have the more expensive products.

“Fine, a halfshard. That’s as high as I’m willing to go,” the merchant said.

I considered that for a second, then shook my head. “No deal. The amount of mana sealed in this horn is more than a halfshard would have.”

The merchant’s brow furrowed as he looked down at the horn. Shrugging, he pulled a halfshard out of a lockbox on the counter and held it up to compare the two. “Alright, that’s fair. Whoever processed this wasn’t half bad at it. Fine, just because the horn has so much mana in it, a halfshard and two tenners. That’s more mana than you’d get out of this thing if you just drained it dry.”

That was true, technically. It didn’t account for my labor in sealing it. Still, I wasn’t planning on doing any alchemy myself anytime soon, and even if I was, the horns were a crutch. A truly skilled alchemist could use pure mana to induce the reactions the horns set off. I wasn’t taking much of a loss here, and I’d traded off other pieces of that monster back at Blighter’s Hole anyway.

“I think you’ve got yourself a deal. One horn for a halfshard and two tenners.”

The merchant fished the rest of the leech stones out his lock box and handed them to me. I dropped them into a satchel and tried to ignore that unpleasant tugging feeling they evoked in my mana. If I’d been thinking, I’d have used the satchel to transfer that whole bag of them earlier, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. If nothing else, I’d learned a bit about how leech stones interacted with phantom spaces, an experiment I would have been happy to perform in my past life.

“Now that that’s settled,” I said, reaching into my space once again to grab the second horn, “how much will you give me for this one?”

Share